The biological effects of diagnostic cardiac imaging on chronically exposed physicians: the importance of being non-ionizing

Ultrasounds and ionizing radiation are extensively used for diagnostic applications in the cardiology clinical practice. This paper reviewed the available information on occupational risk of the cardiologists who perform, every day, cardiac imaging procedures. At the moment, there are no consistent evidence that exposure to medical ultrasound is capable of inducing genetic effects, and representing a serious health hazard for clinical staff. In contrast, exposure to ionizing radiation may result in adverse health effect on clinical cardiologists. Although the current risk estimates are clouded by approximations and extrapolations, most data from cytogenetic studies have reported a detrimental effect on somatic DNA of professionally exposed personnel to chronic low doses of ionizing radiation. Since interventional cardiologists and electro-physiologists have the highest radiation exposure among health professionals, a major awareness is crucial for improving occupational protection. Furthermore, the use of a biological dosimeter could be a reliable tool for the risk quantification on an individual basis

Smart Videocapsule for Early Diagnosis of Colorectal Cancer: Toward Embedded Image Analysis

International audienceFor the last 20 years, wireless videocapsule technology has triggered alot of interest in the gastroenterologist community for the non-invasive early detectionof various gastrointestinal pathologies (ulcers, Chrones disease, polyp detection,etc.). Nevertheless, in most of the European countries videocapsules are notyet considered as a systematic valid alternative to classic endoscopies and colonoscopies.Main reasons are in the existing technological limitations of videocapsulesthat are of two kinds: (i) A limited battery life-time (8 hours usually ensured bythe manufacturer) that does not allow a complete imaging of the gastro intestinaltract, and (ii) the limited performance of the device in terms of detection rate of particularstructures like polyps for instance which degenerations are at the origin ofcolorectal cancer. To overpass these limitations, main idea of our work is to developa generation of smart videocapsules that takes advantage of the constant progress inelectronics and most precisely in embedded signal processing tasks. In this Chapter,we give first a detailed overview of the most recent state-of-the-art related tovideocapsules from the technological perspective in order to clearly positioned ourwork among the existing products and on going projects. In a second time, we proposea synthetic recall of the Cyclope project in the framework of which we arestudying different strategies to improve the performance of current videocapsules inthe particular context of the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer (polyp detection).We then propose a particular focus on the design optimization of the proposed algorithms from an electronic perspective. Most precisely, we give concrete elementsand quantitative estimation (time processing, embedding performance, etc.) to showthat embedding of the signal processing IP inside the videocapsule is feasible consideringthe most recent FPGA-platform performance, and that such an integrationcan bring a positive balance in terms of energy consumption by drastically reducingthe amount of transmitted data